March 26, 2021
Two Iranian-Americans have received Oscar nominations this year but they are in the same category so only one has a chance of winning! Meanwhile, Iran’s submission for best foreign film failed to make the final list of five nominees this year.
There are five nominations in the category of best writing of an adapted screenplay. One went to Ramin Bahrani, who was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to Iranian parents. After college, he traveled to Iran and lived there for three years. He won the nomination for The White Tiger, a drama based in India.
Another nomination in that same category went to Nina Pedrad, who is the younger sister of Nasim Pedrad, best known for her five seasons as a member of the cast of the TV comedy Saturday Night Live. Nina got the nomination, along with eight others, for her work on the comedy Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime to Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.
The other films nominated in that category are Nomadland, The Father and One Night in Miami.
Bahrani, 45, got the nomination for The White Tiger; he directed the film as well as adapting the screenplay from the book of the same name set in India.
It is Bahrani’s eighth film as director. All the previous films have enjoyed widespread honors at film festivals around the world. He has been lauded by film critic Roger Ebert as one of the greatest directors of this century.
Nina Pedrad is generally described as born in Tehran in the 1990s. But her sister is said to have been born in Tehran in 1981 and to have come to the United States at the age of three with her mother, which would suggest sister Nina was born in the US.
Nina Pedrad is primarily a comedy writer and producer, though she has acted in one episode of 30 Rock and six episodes of No Activity. She has produced numerous episodes of Will & Grace, New Girl and No Activity. And she has written several episodes of those same TV shows.
Both Pedrad sisters were raised in Irvine, California. Their parents are Parviz Pedrad and Arasteh Amani, who met in the United States while attending the University of California at Berkeley before returning to Iran.
Iran’s submission for Best Foreign Feature Film was Sun Children, a story of a band of street urchins looking for a buried treasure. Directed by Majid Majidi, it was one of 93 submissions from around the globe. But it failed to make the final five, which were films from Denmark, Romania, Bosnia, Tunisia and Hong Kong.
The Oscar winners will be announced on international television the night of April 25.
Over the decades, Iranians and Iranian expats have garnered 20 Oscar nominations or an average of almost one a year since 1997. But only one Iranian has won an Oscar and he has won two! That is Asghar Farhadi who won what was then called Best Foreign Language Film for A Separation in 2012 and for The Salesman in 2016.
